Monthly Archives: February 2021

Jack wrote this on an energy healing forum in response to a question about attuning an animal to Reiki. For those not familiar, Reiki is an energy transfer method which increases the ability of the body to heal itself, among other uses. A person must be introduced to Reiki (attuned)  by another practitioner. I was the person who attuned Jack, but his healing skills went far beyond most who have been attuned. I think it intensified a natural ability that he already had to manipulate energy.
Most traditional Reiki users would never have even thought of attuning an animal. And most teachers like to attach rules about how the energy should be used, or can be used. As usual, Jack did things his own way.

Hi Jack.. can you please tell me how to attune a cat to Reiki?

The Reiki Master who attuned you should have instructed you on how to do
attunements. If that didn’t happen you might want to get back in touch with
him/her and have them explain it. If the person who attuned you was a
traditional Reiki Master, you’d probably want to explain, also, what you
contemplate doing with the technique, once you learn it, so you can hear
what someone besides me believes about the sort of thing I do. I suspect a
lot of people would believe there’s a downside. I’m non-traditional in most
things I do and I’m non-traditional in Reiki.

Attuning cats as a technique is no different than attuning humans. The only
difference is that you can’t explain the use of the symbols to them in a way
they’ll understand. I use exactly the same process for attuning them as any
Reiki Master would use for close proximity attunement. If I were attuning
some cat in Chicago I’d use the same process I use for attuning by distance,
but I’d have to know a lot more about a cat than I’d need to know about a
human distance-attunement because it’s so difficult to connect to an animal
I don’t know and can’t see.

I never attune wild animals, birds or the wild domestic cats outside to
anything higher than first level. That’s partly because I can’t get them to
sit still long enough, but there are other reasons, too.

I originally attuned my cats because they’re participants in so much else I
do. I discussed the issue with another Reiki Master and some lower-degree
Reiki attuned people before I did it. There was a general trepidation about
it for the most part. But I believe a Reiki Attunement is a purely positive
event in the life of any creature. I didn’t originally do it to my cats for
precisely that reason, but having done so I realized that to be true.
They’ve both been attuned for about a year and they haven’t finished the
growth process that appears to have begun with the third level attunement…
they’re still both in a state of rapid behavioral change. Before the
attunements both cats were several years old and more or less set in their
ways and predictable in their behavior. Now they’re full of surprises and
the surprises are all either neutral (though frequently enigmatic) or
positive. I have some theories about what’s happening to them, but there’s
no point in discussing it at this point because it’s all theory.

I’ve attuned a lot of ravens in my area to first degree, also. It’s
difficult to be certain, because ravens have a lot of strange behaviors
anyway, but my upstairs neighbor (who knows nothing about any of this off
the wall stuff including dowsing, Reiki, mirrors and other things I do) has
commented a number of times about recent unusual raven behavior in our
immediate area.

Some of the other (non-Reiki) things I do involve attunements but I don’t
use them on non-humans. I’d be afraid to do that. But I don’t believe a
strictly Reiki attunement can result in anything other than positive
outcomes for anything in this reality and I don’t think any non-human
creature could intuit ways the attunement could be used in a non-positive
way. One of the ways I’m non-traditional is that I’m convinced the secrecy
of arcane societies, arcane methods and tools, and arcane lore has held back
advancement of the development of the human soul. I believe in the process
of hoarding and guarding the knowledge the users of arcane tools have either
caused, or maintained the compartmentalizaton of concepts and inhibited the
general realization that all this is ‘the same stuff’. Secrecy isn’t my bag.

Best to you,
Jack

Jack wrote this in July, 2005:

Old Jules, do you think is it always One Man-One Woman (or other couple situations) or can we have a bunch of best friends in our life with whom we can share everything in our life?

Any relationship not involving ownership and dependency would be an improvement in my opinion. My personal view is that most male/female relationships get serious a bit prematurely and that sets of unspoken expectations result. Assumed agreements never agreed to by both parties, frequently never even verbalized, which eventually lead to accusations, misunderstandings, more unspoken resentments and guilt.

I think human beings would do better in relationships if they sat down when they saw something serious coming down the pike, each carefully thinking through how much and what he/she expects of a partner in a meaningful relationship, writes it down and thoroughly discusses every aspect and nuance, short-term and long term.

Probably even something in the form of a written contract each can draw out in future times, examine what he/she actually agreed to and whether behavior has actually fallen short of it, or whether ex-post-facto expectations have crept in and become a source of problems.

Of the countless failed relationships I’ve observed [and experienced] over the past decades I believe most wouldn’t have developed at all beyond something temporary and pleasant, or wouldn’t have failed eventually had this been part of the early process.

But I’ve also observed that during the early stages both sides are hiding, holding back, avoiding all manner of matters and expectations which will later become important. Tacit dishonesty based on the ‘I don’t like this about him/her, but I’ll work on changing him/her after he/she is ‘hooked’.

Though probably nobody consciously comes out and directly articulates it to himself/herself.

Old Jules, what’s something unique and strange that makes you, you?

I’m a hermit getting along towards 70 years old living in the middle of nowhere in Texas. I talk to my large flock of free ranging chickens and my four cats. I don’t listen to the radio, don’t have a television, and I once almost went an entire presidential term without knowing who was prez. I became a private pilot by buying an airplane, hiring an instructor, firing him when I got sick of his antics and soloing myself. I had more than 500 hours logged before I ever applied to take an FAA test ride and get a license.

Old Jules, why should I live a life without purpose or happiness?
For a non-drinker the phrase, “You never water good whiskey down,” is meaningless.

I don’t drink much but on special occasions I enjoy a shot of sipping whiskey.
If there’s a reason you should live your life without purpose or happiness it might be because you eventually discover you’ve been watering down good whiskey and all you need to do is take it straight and sip.

Old Jules, has your life been what you expected? If not, in the end does it really matter?

I don’t believe I could have ever imagined much of it ahead of time, but it’s a smile and it’s been a constant adventure. When people talk about being bored I file it away as something to look into next lifetime to see if it’s as interesting as not being bored.

I don’t believe anything about this lifetime is going to end unless I manage to figure out how to do it right so’s I don’t get into the same set of challenges next time around. The prospect gives me a strong motive.

Jack wrote this in June, 2005:

aye’ made a comment on this blog a couple of entries ago that I’ve been thinking about some. Comment was an observation obliquely involving focus.

Brought to mind something I saw a few years ago over an extended period, sort of fits.

The hottest blackjack dealer I’ve ever seen was a young man who looked straight ahead, watched the whole table out of the corners of his eyes, peripheral. He didn’t want to be hot. It killed his tips when he emptied the table and filled the tray with player chips. Almost every new dealer is hot for a few months, but this kid dealt for two years, remained hot as a two-dollar pistol.

Well, I got to be on pretty good terms with him…. he was a Laguna, and I had some interests on tribal lands ‘way off south on the Rez, so we made a trip or two together, but talking about his ‘hot’ problem. He didn’t know what to make of it.

There are some not-too-generally-known ‘psi’ practices that also involve doing just about what he was doing to make things happen…. looking at things out of the ‘corner-of-your-eye-of-the-mind’.

I’d wondered if maybe that wasn’t what he was doing without knowing it.

So I suggested that he try just allowing his eyes to wander over the table and cut out that staring straight ahead thing he did.

It brought immediate improvement…. he started losing about the right amount, same as other dealers.

Then he did something stupid coincidental with his having to pee into a bottle a few days later on a random test and lost his job.

Nice kid, though.

Jack

Jack wrote this in February, 2006:

If you remember them they’re best forgotten.

So, here we are, blogsters.  Good morning to you.

Another Presidents Day’s rolled around.  I hope it hasn’t caught you unprepared.  All you bank employees, Postal workers, government agency employees home from work getting ready to kick up your heels in remembrance.

Hope you got all your shopping done early.  However, today I want to remind you of a couple of things that are often forgotten, get lost in all the hoopla of Presidents Day, most venerated of times.

Think of Franklin Pierce, of Millard Fillmore, of McKinley, Taft and Dwight Eisenhower.

What makes for a truly great President of the US, blogsters?  What symptoms of greatness do you search for?

He’s forgotten.

He managed to pass through the office of President without doing anything much to be remembered for.  He didn’t get enough of his fellow Americans killed to stick in the headlines of memory.

That’s right, blogsters.  The greatest US Presidents are the ones who let the country run itself as it’s supposed to.  They didn’t try to be kings.

They let Congress do the jobs Congress is charged to do by the Constitution, they signed and vetoed Bills put before them by Congress, they signed budget proposals, and didn’t get overly impressed with the powers of office.  If there was a war to be fought, they let Congress declare it to be so, and if Congress hadn’t done so they got us the hell out of it.

They managed to remember that Americans never really wanted a king.

Franklin Pierce,  Millard Fillmore, McKinley, Taft, Dwight Eisenhower and the others you can’t recall.

Those were the great US Presidents.  The ones with names you don’t recognize.  The ones who didn’t try to be kings.

Jack

From Poems of the New Old West:

Say It Like You Mean It

(Trust me on this)

Send her roses now and then

A box of chocolates might help

She loves to hear, “I love you”

Even if you don’t

Candy lies with chocolates and roses

When things get bad

And the secretary winks

Keep in mind

This won’t make it any better

Keep your valentines at home

Secretaries don’t come easy

And two women in your life

Ain’t a big improvement

Over one

When the embers cease to glow

Don’t forget or you’ll regret

You forgot the anniversary

There’s nothing out there better

Give her candlelight and roses

Candy lies with candlelight and roses

From Poems of the New Old West

Copyright 2002, Jack Purcell

——————————————————

There’s something noble in satisfying her yearnings for romance.  It won’t cost you much and, for some reason I never understood, she needs it.

Jack

Jack wrote this in June, 2005:

Old Jules, what were some of the social, political, and religious aspects of the 1940’s and 1950’s?
Socially everyone got together and played canasta or dominos while the kids ran around finding ways to get into trouble without being noticed while they did it. No such event ever happened without one father or another taking off his belt and giving his kid a strapping on the behind.

Politically, most people supported the government, worried about Communism, hated Harry Truman, Ike, and Keefaufer with his coonskin hat. The UnAmerican Activities Committee filled the radios daytimes, and the investigations of the US prisoners from Korea who were accused of collaborating with the enemy. The ‘cheerleaders’, white housewives, went out every day in Arkansas to yell insults and harass eleven black children who were being integrated into ‘white’ schools, accompanied by US Marshalls to protect them from the cheerleaders and the Arkansas National Guard placed there by Governor Orville Faubus to keep them from attending.

Religious, most people were Christians. The more they hated blacks the more Christian they were. They also hated Mormons, in most areas, Catholics, Hispanics, and whatever ethnic groups and religious denominations they weren’t members of.

As a youngster I witnessed heated, vicious debates between Church of Christ kids and Baptist kids about which of them were doomed to hell and which would be going to heaven. The favorite putdown for days afterward:

“I won’t be seeing YOU there!”

Old Jules, what can you tell me about open range ranching in the 1800s?

It still exists in a lot of states. The person owning the livestock isn’t responsible for fencing them in. Instead, anyone who doesn’t want them grazing and damaging his property has to fence them out. Cattle graze across public highways and if someone hits one he’s responsible for the damages, both to the animal and to his own vehicle (if the road had a sign on it showing a cow on a yellow background).

It’s a holdover from the wild west days when ranchers developed a tradition of running roughshod over anyone who got in their way, and they still do it and the cattleman organizations are powerful enough to keep it that way.

Old Jules, what are some of the disadvantages of war and advantages of peace?

The disadvantage of wars is that usually both sides begin them with the expectation of winning and one or the other side eventually is proven to be wrong. This fact becomes established at the cost of large reductions in the size of the gene pool on both sides among men of reproductive age.

As a rule, wars breed physical and moral cowardice, overall reductions in character and intelligence, and reduced incentives in succeeding generations because of this gene pool phenomenon.

The advantage of peace is that it’s cheap, easy, and the patriots can’t get their claws into the aftermath, make money from the exercise, and gain power so thoroughly and rapidly.

Old Jules, why should I study history?

Nobody who quotes the cliche can go a step further and show where any mistake in history was avoided by knowing history. The opposite is true.

You are required to study and memorize something called history to indoctrinate you to the views your elders and government believe you should be indoctrinated to in order for you to hold the viewpoints they wish you to hold. You need to know the names of forgotten, obscure females of the past so’s to give modern females a feeling of worth and an idea they, themselves might possibly accomplish something in life (implying they couldn’t do so if there weren’t obscure females in history who did something worth memorizing).

You are required to memorize facts about oppressed peoples and slavery so you will feel sorry about it and will conclude those people of the past who experienced hardship represent an explanation for their descendants who didn’t experience it to have reason for resentment and frequently an excuse for resisting becoming educated so’s they have a chance to amount to something.

There are solid reasons you are required to study history, though nobody cares whether you actually learn it, but those reasons don’t include anything akin to history.

Jack wrote this in February, 2006:

Hi blogsters:

On the Pine Hill Navajo (self-determination) Rez south of Ramah Chapter there’s a place that’s come to be called, “Skin-Walker Valley” by everyone who’s willing to use the word.  Interestingly, the valley extends into an area checker-boarded with white-owned lands called Candy Kitchen.

What’s surprising is that, while the Skin-Walker phenomenon clearly began on Din’e land, the weirdness and negativity spills over and permeates into the white community.  Although some good folks, both white and Din’e live and make out as best they can in this remote area, it’s shockingly pervaded by all manner of crime.  Speed freaks and laboratories are drawn there as by a magnet.

Violence is pandemic.  As an example, a few years ago three Navajo youths tortured and killed an octogenarian white woman in her home, puncturing her skull with a screwdriver eighteen times until she died.  She had nothing much worth stealing.  They did it for ‘fun’.

When the lads were identified they were arrested on the Rez, where tribal authorities resisted giving them up for white justice for several days.

Meanwhile, deep in the Rez to the north, near Pueblo Pintada, another valley is rapidly coming to be known as ‘Skin-Walker Valley’, and another at Alamo, far to the southeast.

This phenomenon, were it discussed openly and recognized as in need of investigation, would be far easier for tribal officials to develop strategies to deal with.  Open discussion would also help nearby residents and authorities off the Rez toward a clearer perspective concerning an energy and a belief system that is oozing up through the cracks of their lives, slouching across from tribal lands.

More of this later.

Jack

Jack posted this on a forum for energy workers in 2006, but there is something for everyone here:

I’ve given some of the first steps in the mechanical process for beginning energy work.  Those should help with practice, or maybe without it.

However, there are some other facets to energy work that are more basic and certainly as necessary.

If you’re filled with anger you’re already spilling off metaphysical energy.  You just happen to be out of control.  The problem with that is that in some ways metaphysical energy behaves in a ‘liquid’ fashion.

As an energy element anger is force.  It’s compelling.  It tends to be expelled, both in bursts, and in a general spillage.

When anger leaves your spirit-body in bursts it does so in a way that leaves behind a vacuum, and it leaves open a channel for other energy to re-enter to fill the void.   When it does so as a sustained spillage or overflow the return is slower, but still inexorable.

That void will be filled with the kind of energy you’ve surrounded yourself with, invited into your life.  Usually it’s manifested in ways designed to reinforce the habit of anger, to justify continuing the same course.

The great negative mandala.  The circle of self-limitation and self-destruction.

The components are blame, lousy self-esteem, fear, and more anger, all chewing away at themselves inside you, dissolving your spiritual power and frequently your physical power, as well.

Self-Esteem

If you have lousy self-esteem there’s a good chance it’s because you’re the one who knows you best.  You’ve bought into some value system, measured yourself by it, found yourself wanting.

• One of the ways you can short-circuit the negative mandala is to examine that value system you’re measuring yourself by, and decide whether it’s one you adopted consciously, or whether it’s something you came by through brainwashing by the society you live in.  Your parents, your peers, your television set.
• If that’s the case, you’ll probably need to adopt another yardstick to measure yourself by.
• However, if you have lousy self-esteem because you are a lousy person no one should respect, I’d offer the observation there’s only one way to change it.  Become the kind of person you do respect.

Blame

• One cornerstone of the anger-cathedral is blame.  Where ever there’s anger Old Man Blame is always there lurking in a dark corner, whispering, “You aren’t responsible for what you are.  It’s your parents.  It’s the school.  It’s the government.  It’s the white man, the black man, the Jew.  The Arabs.  The Demos, the Republicans, the New Agers, the Christian fundamentalists, ad infinitum. It’s the boss, the job, the ‘system’ that’s to blame.  Not you.”  Never you.
• You know better.  Every moment of your life you are making the choices.  Everything in this reality is open to you, same as to everyone else.  If you see doors closed in front of you, you are well aware you can kick them down, or go around them.  If you want to take control of your life you are going to have to accept total responsibility for what you are, who you are and what you are going to become.

Fear

• If you are like most modern humans in the western world you’ve conditioned yourself to be a moral and physical coward.  Your electronic media has helped you along with a daily dose of fear.  If you want to end your anger, blame and lousy self-esteem, you’ve got to break that cycle of fear.  Nobody respects a coward.  Quit worrying about diseases that might kill you, terrorists that might crawl up on the beaches of your life with butcher-knives clenched between their teeth.  Quit worrying about something that might happen next week, but probably won’t.
• You are going to die.  It ain’t a big deal.  Happens to everyone.  Whether it happens to you this evening driving home, or next week or next year is mostly up for grabs.  Whether it happens at the same time as it happens to a million other people, or just as part of the usual trickle of human death moving through time is of absolutely no consequence in the overall scheme of things.  You’re going to experience pain, hardship, loss, the same as everyone who’s ever lived.  Those are a part of life.  They can also be a source of joy if you love what you are.  You couldn’t be what you are if it weren’t for the growth that came from facing hardships and challenge.  Recognize you have reason to be grateful for every stumble, every hurdle, every pain.
• If you want to end your anger, dismantle your structure of negative energy loss, you’re going to have to quit being a coward.  You’re going to have to quit being afraid.  You’re going to have to learn to focus on the joy between the crying and the dying.  You’re going to have to recognize that you’re blessed with some finite, but unknown limit to the number of days you get to walk around this mudball, and that for this lifetime it’s all you have.  If you want to respect yourself you are going to have to live it without fear and without reaching out ahead of yourself to find ways it might end prematurely.

Boundaries

• One fundamental source of anger in this life involves a failure to recognize what’s your business, your challenge, and what belongs to someone else.  If you can’t do anything to influence it, it belongs to someone else.
• Knowing what’s happening to someone in some distant place is not something you can control.  Quit knowing about it.
• Knowing about lousy choices your president, your second-cousin, your favorite celebrity, your aunt Tillie are making is also out of your control.  They ain’t your business.  You can do nothing about it except seethe.  ANGER.  If you can’t change it, get it out of your life.

Forgiveness

• Without a constant injection of forgiveness all the rest is meaningless.  You’re going to have to recognize we’re all a lot of flawed creatures muddling along, not doing a particularly good job of doing our best.  No one else is any better at it than you are.
• Begin by forgiving yourself for what a piece of dog-dung you’ve probably been in your life and maybe still are.  Recognize that it’s the choices you make today and tomorrow that will allow you not to have to forgive yourself tomorrow.
• Forget what everyone else has done, is doing.  It’s outside your control.  Forgive yourself.  After you’ve done that, if you need an occasional reminder that what others do is none of your business, forgive them, too.  Every moment, every day, forgive them for being flawed creatures, no better, no worse than you.

There are a number of techniques for doing all this.  Step by step methods.  If there’s any interest, I’ll go into some of them in future entries.

Best to all of you,
Jack